Euobserver.com

As the EU unit dealing fake news and propaganda is under threat, it is now time for some leadership in the fight against Russian disinformation.

In Europe, more than a third of those killed each year by toxic particulate matter - associated with unlawful diesel emissions exceeding the EU limits - live in about 100 conurbations, mainly in Italy, France, Germany, UK, Netherlands, Belgium, Spain.

Carlos Moedas is proposing a €100bn budget for research, with a new agency for disruptive innovation and specific "missions" to catch Europeans' attention.

People seeking refuge from war and poverty could be corralled into "unattractive" detention centres outside the EU if one European clique gets its way.

Winnie Byanyima, the executive director of Oxfam International, tells EUobserver in an interview that the organisation is undergoing profound changes following the sex abuse scandal reported in February. "We've changed a lot and we are continuing to change," she says.

French lawmakers are complaining that the mountain of legislation put forward by president Emmanuel Macron is forcing them into overdrive. Parliament speaker Francois de Rugy, told Europe 1 radio that "in recent weeks we have sat for eighty hours per week. We have sat for the last 17 days consecutively". Fatigue has also hit the prime minister's office, where reportedly 14 secretaries and four advisors left in one year.

US president Donald Trump's economic policy will have a negative impact on the rest of the world, according to a survey of 913 economists across 120 countries by the ifo Institute. US tariffs would have a negative influence, said 78 percent of the economists and would also hit America, said 66 percent. Countries outside the EU and the USA stand to be the biggest losers.

Europe should "Europeanise" its presence on the UN security council with a rotating group of about 10 member states working with veto-power France, and the European Commission, to "speak with one European voice," German chancellor Angela Merkel proposed to fellow EPP parties in Munich on Wednesday preparing next year's European parliament elections. "The world is being reorganised," she said. Germany does not have permanent seat on the UN security council.

Spain's new socialist prime minister Pedro Sanchez has appointed 11 women and six men to his cabinet, a higher proportion of woman than anywhere else in Europe. Sanchez explained his cabinet reflected the change in Spain that had emerged on 8 March when an estimated five million women across the country staged a 'feminist strike'. Josep Borrell, a former European Parliament president, will be foreign minister in the new government.

Some 60 percent of Danes do not want to replace their national currency, the kroner, with the euro, with only 26 percent in favour, according to a Norstat poll published on Thursday by Jyllands-Posten and Altinget. The Danes first rejected the euro in a referendum in 2000. The majority of Danes also want to keep opting out from EU defence initiatives (57 percent) and justice and police cooperation (54 percent).

The European Commission as of 4 June is allowing Oxfam access to EU funding, which it froze following media revelations of a sex abuse scandal by the Times newspaper earlier this year. The commission says Oxfam has put in place "adequate mechanisms" to prevent, detect, and respond to cases of sexual misconduct. It says "resumption will be done on a case by case basis, contract by contract with strict monitoring."

The European Commission adopted Wednesday an update of the Blocking Statute, a 1996 regulation that allows EU companies to dodge US extraterritorial sanctions. It added to the regulation's scope sanctions the US would impose on EU companies that do business with Iran after the US pulled of the Iran nuclear deal. The EU executive also modified the European Investment Bank's mandate to allow it to support projects in Iran.

The European Commission confirmed on Wednesday that the EU will start to impose in July extra duties on US products valued at up to €2.8bn of trade, in reaction to tariffs on EU steel and aluminium that the US launched on 1 June. Member states will have to agree on which products will taxed, from a list that was prepared in March.

A group of MEPs led by Dutch liberal Sophia in 't Veld and called the "Rule of Law monitoring group", is to monitor Malta's investigation into the murder of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia amid lack of faith in Maltese due process. The group, created Tuesday by the civil liberties committee in the European Parliament, has a mandate to conduct fact-finding missions and hearings until the end of the year.

The anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats (SD) party is on course to win one in five votes in elections in September, an opinion poll by the country's statistical office said Tuesday. SD polled to win 18.5 percent of votes, up 5.6 points on 2014 elections. The ruling, centre-left Social Democrats polled at 28.3 percent (down 2.7 points) and the main centre-right opposition party, the Moderates, got 22.6 percent (down 0.7).

Turkish fighter jets repeatedly violated Greek airspace Tuesday in an area overhead the Greek defence minister's visit to the Aegean island of Psaros in what Athens saw as revenge for its decision, on Monday, to free eight Turkish officers who fled there after the failed coup in Turkey in 2016 instead of extraditing them. Greece had become "a refuge for coup plotters," the Turkish foreign ministry said the same day.

Conservative Spanish prime minister Marian Rajoy took a swipe at his successor, the centre-left's Pedro Sanchez, Tuesday, in a tearful speech announcing his own resignation over a corruption scandal. He said Sanchez, who relied on the left-wing Podemos party and Catalan and Basque nationalist factions to get into power, would face a "stigma" or extremism that "will accompany this government from the first moment of its existence until the end".

German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier has warned that both Poland and the EU would end up as losers if Poland tore down EU values on judicial independence. "Where these values are called into question, we all lose," he said in Warsaw on Tuesday. "If the cohesion of the European Union breaks down, none of us will gain national clout," he said, amid threats of EU sanctions over Polish judicial reforms.

The European Investment Bank (EIB) is unhappy at EU plans to make it finance infrastructure projects in Iran to offset US sanctions in Europe's bid to save the nuclear arms control deal, Reuters reports. "The bank is unhappy with the [European] Commission proposal because the bank raises funds on US markets," one EU diplomat said. The Luxembourg-based lender has also denominated about a third of its loans in US dollars.

Poland's ruling PiS party is angling to move from the anti-federalist ECR group in the European Parliament to the centre-right EPP ahead of EU elections, Polish media report, citing diplomats and PiS insiders. The move comes as the British Conservative Party prepares to quit the ECR due to Brexit, hollowing out the faction. Hungary's Fidesz party, an EPP member, is now seen by PiS as its principal EU ally instead.